Internet shopping, online banking, and other network-based forms of transmitting sensitive data are highly popular, but both the computer servers hosting the online services and the client computing devices consuming the online services may be susceptible to a variety of security breaches resulting from computer viruses, backdoors, keyloggers and other forms of attacks on the servers and the client computing devices. These attacks generally relate to vulnerabilities in the operating systems of the computer servers and the client computing devices that are used to access the network.
Existing solutions either rely on software alone (such as anti-virus software) or limited hardware support for storing cryptographic keys using a secure cryptoprocessor (such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM)). Neither separates the sensitive tasks from the non-sensitive tasks in order to provide heightened security protection to the sensitive tasks. What is needed is a suitable computing environment to implement security solutions that separates the sensitive tasks from the non-sensitive tasks, and in particular, take advantage of virtual machine technologies to provide separate computing resources to sensitive tasks and non-sensitive tasks.